


The Sound of Silence

by thermodynamicActivity (chlorinetrifluoride)



Series: The Collegestuck 'Verse [1]
Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alternate Universe - Human, Depression, Gen, Vietnam War, the 1960s
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-25
Updated: 2016-04-25
Packaged: 2018-06-04 12:31:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 5
Words: 2,566
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6657802
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/chlorinetrifluoride/pseuds/thermodynamicActivity
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Your name is Dolores Martineau, and you are a guidance counselor, one possessing experience with the idea that problem students are often students with problems. This is not something you learned in grad school, it's a lesson you mastered firsthand. Other faculty members want to know why you empathize so much with the kids who miss weeks of school because of various issues, whose grades have plummeted dangerously, with little hope of improvement.</p><p>But your reasons aren’t a story you owe your colleagues. You’ve never told any of them why, and you never will. It’s been nearly thirty years since certain events within your life took place. There's no use in dredging up the distant past.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. i've come to talk with you again

**Author's Note:**

> this is the tale of how and why dolores started to become everyone's mother.

This is a sort of prequel to ["Parsley, Sage, Rosemary, and Thyme"](http://archiveofourown.org/works/4800740?view_full_work=true), which I suggest you read before you read this. Originally, this was where that fic was going to begin, but then I decided to begin PSRT when Dolores was already twenty-six.

Still, I found this in my google docs while I was looking for something else, and figured it was a story worth telling. It's short enough.

 _Hear my words that I might teach you._  
_Take my arms that I might reach you,_  
_but my words like silent raindrops fell,_  
_and echoed in the wells of silence._  
\- Simon and Garfunkel, The Sound of Silence

* * *

 

_**1998 - Bedford Park** _

Your name is Dolores Martineau, and you are a guidance counselor. A guidance counselor with a soft spot for truants and the otherwise difficult cases. 

One thing grad school never had to teach you - troublesome students are often troubled students.

Other faculty members want to know why you empathize so much with the kids who miss weeks of school because of various issues, whose grades have plummeted dangerously, with little hope of improvement. 

These are students existing on the verge of being encouraged to transfer to other high schools - expulsion by a kinder name - and you persist in trying to get through to them long after others have given up.

But your reasons aren’t a story you owe your colleagues.

You’ve never told any of them why, and you never will. Not even Masae, and you’re dating her. 

You think she’s pieced most of it together, anyway. She has this knack for understanding you that borders on being able to read your mind.

Why would you tell anyone?

It’s been nearly thirty years since –

_(spearmint gum, the dissonant harmony of crying babies, the smell of your mother lying in bed)_

It’s been nearly thirty years since these events took place. There’s no use in dredging up the distant past.

After ninth period ends, you walk to the nearest bodega and buy yourself a pack of cigarettes. Then, you walk down to Woodlawn cemetery and sit in front of one headstone until long after it gets dark.

 _“Lola, I found you!”_ comes a memory older than your sorrow. 

You sit and smoke until your entire pack is empty, until the autumn chill has seeped into your bones. Then, you get up and stand there for awhile longer.

_**Leandre Antoine Martineau** _   
_**b. 1949  d. 1968** _

_“I’ve found you too, Leandre,”_ you think to your brother.  _“You’re it now.”_


	2. take my arms that i might reach you

**_1964 - Prospect Park_ **

Your parents would kill you if they knew what you were doing. They let your older brother’s occasional rule breaking slide they way they always do, but you, Dolores, you are a _young lady_. And _young ladies_ most definitely do not climb trees in catholic school uniforms, or at all.

“Get down before you break your neck!” Leandre warns you.

You stick your tongue out at him, and pull yourself up to a higher branch. You wave down to him.

“Come and get me, then!”

You sit pretty on your perch, and gaze around, at all the beautiful shades of autumn. Russet, golds, deep reds, all bright, like sunshine. Even though your two front teeth are missing, still growing in, and their absence makes you self-conscious, you grin at the leaves.

You lean forward to pluck the most vibrant leaf of all, and end up overbalancing out of the tree.

It’s not a terribly long fall to the ground, but it’s bad enough for you to break your leg.

As you sob in bewildered pain, Leandre carries you to the hospital, holding you so that your leg moves as little as possible. You’re less worried about the state of your leg, and more worried about the state of your clothes. First off, your mother is going to kill you. Second off, you really do like this skirt, and it’s ruined.

“Shame your leg isn’t as hard as your head, Lola,” Leandre mutters. You’d kick him for that, but you can’t.


	3. narrow streets of cobblestone

**_1967 - Classon Avenue_ **

From outside, it was just another day. All was calm. Ordered. Controlled. At least as controlled as it could be during rush hour.

You walk the short distance from St. Peter Claver school to your house, and unlock the door, expecting that your mother will be cooking dinner, and that your father will be working. 

The radio will be switched on, the dog will be out in the yard, and your two little brothers will be either spitting up their lunch or crying the way all babies do. Your mother will sing to them until they stop.

You take off your shoes at the front door, and switch the radio to something less boring than listening to the President talk.

But instead of cooking, your mother sits on a chair in the kitchen, a piece of mail clenched in her fist. You glance quickly at the card, which looks official.

It can only be one thing. The thing that other young men have received.

Uncle Sam is looking for Leandre.

“I told him he shoulda gone to college,” your mother keeps saying, as if she can change the course of history through repetition. “We could have found money to send him to college. He could have been a doctor.”

He could have been. His grades were excellent.

He always talked about it, buying himself a secondhand copy of Gray’s Anatomy from the bookstore on Bergen and thumbing through the yellowed pages with a hushed reverence.

It does not matter now. The draft card has seen to that.

But maybe it will when he returns. Then he can go to St. John’s and become a surgeon, or something. 

Because he will return, you know it in your bones. You are Lola Martineau and you refuse to accept any other outcome.

Leandre tells your mother how he will make his country proud. Your father says that he knows he will, there’s not a single doubt in his mind about that.

"I'm already proud of you," Papa tells Leandre, who beams.

Manman smiles stiffly in response, holding her other two sons close to her chest. 


	4. turned my collar to the cold and damp

**_1968 - Woodlawn Cemetery_ **

Drizzle drifts around you, seeping into the grass, making each of your steps muddier than the last. Drizzle and the rustle of your dress against your stocking legs.

The mourners stand around your heavily pregnant mother, huddled around her son’s casket, in a sea of black and grey, mirroring that of the sky.

Matante Martine begins to say the rosary, the gentle rise and fall of the Our Father coming like a song. Some murmur condolences, some weep, and others do nothing but stand in silence. You are in the third category of people. No matter how many times they tell you that that he died a hero’s death on the other side of the world, you refuse to believe it.

This morning, your mother handed you a black dress a size too big for you, one of hers, and instructed you to put it on, but you spent more than half an hour looking through Leandre’s baseball cards, which you put back in the proper place for when he returned.

Because the war is over there, not _here._

The war is television.

The war is draft cards in other mailboxes.

The war is young adults streaming through the East Village, yelling, _“Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?”_

Leandre _swore_ he was coming back. He swore on all his possessions. He swore on his Gray’s Anatomy. He swore on his _baseball cards._

When you two were younger, your favorite game was hide and seek. You are waiting for him to poke his head out from behind a mausoleum, and yell either, _“Dolores, you’re it!”_ or _“Lola, I’m counting to thirty!”_

You listen for the sound of his laughter, waiting for him to mock you for falling for such an obvious joke. It’s like that book you’re reading in English class, Tom Sawyer. Just like that book.

You suppress the urge to laugh, because that is the last thing you need to do with all the adults around you looking so serious. The group of people gathers closer together while the chaplain blesses the casket.

You chew on your lip.

Then, the Army men, clad in full dress uniform, remove the flag from the top of the casket, fold it into a neat little triangle, and present it to your mother, who bursts into tears.

That’s when you lose it, not because Leandre is still hiding, but because your mother, the strongest person you know, is utterly inconsolable. You wrap an arm around her waist to support her. She leans down, against you. Her tears soak through your dress and onto your shoulder.

Even over the next few months, though Leandre never sends you another letter, you refuse to believe. You count down days until his tour is up.

When your mother takes to her bed for weeks at a time, and not even your father can convince her to emerge for long enough to shower and dress, or to nurse your infant sister, you still don’t believe. 

But you start to accept.

You won’t cry, though. You can’t cry. You must be steadfast for Manman, be the strong person she would want you to be. You must be strong for her until she can be strong again.

She only emerges when Matante Martine comes over, and then, that’s to prepare tea, and pretend to be a shadow of the hostess she once was.

In low voices, they whisper in the kitchen, ‘Tante drinking her tea, and your mother staring off into space. Martine implores her to seek solace in God, in the Saints. To count her blessings and remember she has four more children to care for. Repeats it in Kreyol, asks God to bless her, to watch over Leandre’s soul, to keep him in his arms. 

That’s the first time you ever hear your mother swear. She tells Martine that if there were a God, Leandre would be more than a folded flag. When Martine shoots back that God works in mysterious ways, your mother screams at her to take her killer God, her apathetic God, her useless God, and get the hell out of her house.

You grab your mother’s arm to stop her from chasing your aunt into the street. With great effort, you manage to calm her down. You guide her, as she sobs, back upstairs to her room.

All the babies wake up, wailing their discomfort, their fear, their confusion. You calm them down, too. It’s so much easier to calm _them_ down.


	5. no one dare disturb the sound of silence

_**1969 - Atlantic Avenue** _

You skip class every now and then. 8th grade is meaningless in the scheme of things.

Sometimes, you take the 4 train the whole route, all the way down to Woodlawn and stare at a certain headstone, willing everything to become clear, for some kind of divine message to smack you in the forehead like a rock, to give you a sense of direction.

Other times, you sit in Prospect Park, smoking one or two of the cigarettes you’ve found in crumpled packets in the pockets of your father’s pants.

In one year, you’ve gone from being bewildered to being furious.

Still, you are unsure what to do with your fury. Do you take to the streets with the college students? Do you volunteer at the VA hospital? Are you old enough to volunteer at the VA hospital? You could pretend to be sixteen. You think you could pass for sixteen.

Nevertheless, is there even time for you to volunteer at the VA hospital?

You contemplate of the incessant demands of babies, the mounting number of school assignments you have missing, and decide that no, there is not.

You load up on spearmint gum at the corner store, go home, and pray your father doesn’t recognize the smell of smoke on you. 

He does not. He has other things on his mind. Occasionally he’ll start to tell you how proud he is of you, but the words trail off before he can finish. Maybe he’s tired of telling his children how proud he is. Look what happened to the first one.

He buries himself in his copy of the New York Times, which you hand him along with a cup of tea.

On television, you watch news broadcasters and their optimism about the war, as if each evening report might be part of a turning point. Whenever your mother comes downstairs, if she comes downstairs, you either switch it off or change the channel.

It’s been over six months since you’ve heard her speak a single word.

You cook dinner for your father, trying your best to season it the way she might.

You stay up until your sister, fussy little thing that she is, goes to sleep, and pray that she doesn’t wake up screaming. You sing her lullabies in Kreyol and try your best to sound like Manman.

And, the next day, with your toddler younger brothers in tow, as you push two strollers, you run errands. ‘Tante Martine is thankfully watching Fabiola.

The night before grocery day - or what should be grocery day, the refrigerator is nearly empty - you make a list of essentials, and leave it on the kitchen counter.

When you awaken in the morning, after your father has gone to work, a small allowance sits beside it, and the grocery list has had several addenda made to it. 

You almost jump for joy to find that your mother has returned to her mind enough to correct your list, but upon further scrutiny, realize that this is Papa’s handwriting.

You walk upstairs, pad quietly into your mother’s room, and kiss her on the forehead.

She merely blinks at you. 

You coax her into sitting up, and gently, always gently, comb the knots and tangles from her hair. She says nothing the whole time. When you’re finished, she says nothing.

You want to tell her that you love her, but she says nothing, so you say nothing. You have a half-mind to speak, but your mother's silence is so thick that you don't think you could get through.

You go downstairs, stop Jean-Claude from launching his breakfast at the wall, and wonder if you have time to go to school today, if it really matters if you don’t. 

As long as you pass - even with the lowest possible passing grades - you’ll go to some sort of high school, and you could pass your classes with both hands tied behind your back.

You have more pressing issues to consider, anyway.

Taking Sebastien down to the doctor for his croupy sounding cough. Dropping the other two children off at Martine’s. 

Maybe you can convince her to write you a note explaining your lateness to the principal.

But it doesn’t make a difference, either way.

Not to you.

You are Dolores Martineau, and you have been taught that family always comes first. You are the mother now, you are the mother until Manman comes back, so school can wait.

School can always wait.

Your brother was brilliant in all of his classes, and look at all the good it did him.

So, worst case scenario, you repeat the 8th grade.

And even that doesn’t seem so terrible in the scheme of things.

Not anymore.


End file.
